10/03/2023
Sometimes a failure and a success go together. That is what hap-
pened with the flop of Amazon’s Fire Phone and the success of the
Amazon Echo, the company’s smart speaker and home assistant de-
vice known as Alexa. “While the Fire Phone was a failure, we were
able to take our learnings (as well as the developers’) and accelerate
our efforts building Echo and Alexa,” Bezos wrote in his 2017 stock-
holder letter.
His enthusiasm for Echo grew out of his love of Star Trek. When
playing Star Trek games with his friends as a kid, Bezos liked to play
the role of the computer on the starship Enterprise. “The vision for
Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer,” he wrote.
“The idea also had origins in two other arenas where we’d been
building and wandering for years: machine learning and the cloud.
From Amazon’s early days, machine learning was an essential part of
our product recommendations, and AWS gave us a front-row seat to
the capabilities of the cloud. After many years of development, Echo
debuted in 2014, powered by Alexa, who lives in the AWS cloud.”
The result was a wonderful combination of smart speakers, a Star
Tre k chatty home computer, and an intelligent personal assistant.
The genesis of Amazon Echo was, in one way, like Steve Jobs’s
development of Apple iPod. It arose out of intuition rather than
focus groups, and it was not in response to some obvious customer
demand. “No customer was asking for Echo,” Bezos says. “Market re-
search doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said,
‘Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about
the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that
also turns on your lights and plays music?’ I guarantee you they’d
have looked at you strangely and said ‘No, thank you.’” In a sweet
irony, Bezos was able to trounce Apple in creating such a home de-
vice and then make its components—voice recognition and machine
learning—work better than competing devices from both Google
and, later, Apple.
